Open Source rising
in N.Z. education

Catalyst IT drives FOSS's solutions
in learning, using Moodle and Mahara

The last three years has seen a dramatic uptake of Open Source in New Zealand in the Education sector. The Tertiary Education Commission has an e-Learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF) that provides the means for a wide variety of New Zealand tertiary institutions to develop sustainable Open Source solutions.

I started working at Catalyst IT in Wellington in May of 2004, just as the first round of the eCDF Funded New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (NZOSVLE) project was starting to get underway. NZOSVLE was being led by the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, with a consortium of eight tertiaries, and Catalyst IT as technology provider.

The first goal of the project was to create a web-based collaborative environment for the NZOSVLE consortium partners. Eduforge.org was set up as this platform. Eduforge is based on the gForge codebase, which came out of SourceForge, so provides tools for managing projects. These days Eduforge has added wikis and blogs, and plays host to over 150 Education related Open Source projects worldwide.

As the obvious start to any good Virtual Learning Environment setup is a Learning Management System, the next step was an extensive evaluation of the Open Source Candidates. Catalyst IT performed an extensive analysis, looking at modularity of the code, security, scalability, as well as the structure of the projects themselves, and their responsiveness to bug reports and patches. As a result of this analysis, Moodle was selected as clearly the best project.

The Open Polytechnic were already using some form of web-based course delivery, so a gap analysis directed our development of Moodle. We started writing code and pitching it at the Moodle community and very soon afterwards, I got CVS access to the core project. We also undertook an integration with the Open Polytechnic's student management system, so their academic structure which was managed by a separate program would be seamlessly replicated within Moodle. Users could log in for the first time and find all their courses were set up for them. As Moodle's primary means of communicating with its users is email, it was important for the Open Polytechnic to be able to provide email accounts to all students if needed, so we did an integration with SquirrelMail as well. We worked solidly on Moodle and the integrations over the second half of 2004, set up a cluster of machines to run Moodle on, and had a very successful launch on the 1st November. In the first few weeks after the switchover, the usage of the Online Campus significantly increased, while the helpdesk calls decreased.

We were closely monitoring the cluster for performance, and in the first few months after launch we did a lot of performance tweaking in Moodle, all of which we put directly into the stable branch -- at that time, the 1.4 series. At that stage, the Open Polytechnic installation was the largest installation of Moodle world wide, with about 35,000 students and 8,000 courses. And we were one of the only installations running on Postgres, which made us de facto maintainers of the Postgres support.

Development continued with Moodle, with Catalyst doing a lot of feature work to meet requirements from the NZOSVLE consortium. We continued to add more installations of Moodle to our cluster, and did another student management system integration for another polytechnic. NZOSVLE recieved a second round of funding from eCDF, and the consortium group grew to 20.

At this time, because Catalyst was hosting the largest installation of Moodle, we became the default experts in running Moodle on an Enterprise Scale, and this led to some consulting with other large institutions. Since then, The Open University UK have adopted Moodle, with 200,000 students. Athabasca University in Canada also has a large installation, and UCLA have recently announced their intention to migrate to Moodle.

But it's not just the tertiary sector that are interested in Moodle. We are increasingly seeing the likes of government departments and private companies wanting to use Open Source solutions to provide web-based HR training, as well as personal development, and they too are finding that Moodle works well for them. Catalyst has been in the privileged position of being able to provide services in this area as well.

Moodle is a great example of how Open Source can really be a viable business model. The developers are a mix of volunteers, as well as people who are paid to work on it. While the work I do on Moodle primarily comes about because a client is paying Catalyst to write code and Catalyst is paying me to do it, there have been many bugs and things I've worked on in my spare time as well. I've just volunteered to be a mentor for the Google Summer of Code project, for which Moodle has been accepted as an organisation. Since I feel that I owe Moodle a lot for my own career development over the last three years, I'm more than happy to give a bit of my spare time to the project.

As many other Open Source projects start, Moodle was originally written to scratch an itch. These days though, there's Moodle HQ, a team of programmers who are paid directly to work on Moodle, as well as a global Moodle Partners program. Projects like Moodle are doing amazing things to knock down the stereotype that Open Source projects are not ready for serious, large scale, rock solid environments.

It's not just Moodle. Catalyst have been involved in a number of other Open Source Education projects, not least of which is Mahara, a project I've been involved in. Mahara means to think, thought, reflection in Te Reo Maori. Mahara is an electronic portfolio system that is designed to run alongside Moodle, and provide a student-centered space to create and store learning related artefacts, present them to different groups of people in varied ways, as well as some social networking functionality.

Mahara was also funded by eCDF, and led by Massey University with a consortium group of four tertiaries. In contrast to our approach with Moodle, we found that there wasn't an existing Open Source platform that provided enough feature fit and modularity to start from, so we decided to write from scratch, but still follow the Open Source model. All the documentation about the project has been available since Day One, hosted on Eduforge, we're using public version control and Mahara is licensed under the GPL. It's a relatively new project, we've just gone to a pilot case study phase for seven tertiary institutions, but we're already seeing interest from a lot of different areas, and work has just begun on an integration with Moodle.

Having a consortium group of a number of institutions behind a software project fits very well with the Open Source model. It means that end users are engaged from the outset, and are actually in a position to help drive the development and future of a project. This model isn't even viable for a proprietry product, where it is generally very difficult to have any input into the direction of new releases.

Catalyst IT is a unique company in that not only do we leverage Open Source in the services we provide, but we're also committed to contributing to Open Source. On staff we have people who contribute to a variety of different open source projects, both through work and on their own time. It's not unusual for a lunchtime curry to end up in a fierce argument about the merits of different version control systems, window managers, distributions of GNU/Linux, different Open Source licenses, and of course, emacs vs vim. As we interview potential staff members, it's not unusual to ask them to fix a bug on an Open Source project, and submit a patch for review. And of course, when we hire new staff, they arrive on their first day to an Ubuntu workstation.

Of course, it's not just in the education sector in which Catalyst is working on Open Source. We're running some of New Zealand's core infastructure on Open Source. The New Zealand Shared Registry System, managing the .nz namespace is Open Source and released on Sourceforge. The New Zealand electoral roll runs on an entirely Open Source stack. Catalyst has recently launched Open 4 business, which is a project designed to provide information about Open Source for New Zealand businesses in one place.

Today, Catalyst is a company of 75, managed by the six founding directors, who all still work full time at Catalyst. One of these directors recently described Catalyst IT as a 'meritocratic managerial un-structure'. In that regard, the way the company functions is analagous to an Open Source project. And it's working well. When I started, the Moodle and Education team was just one other person and me. Now there are 15 of us.

As you might guess, I'm pretty happy to have found a paid job where I get to write Open Source code all day. One thing that I have found is that in a traditional development role, the features you write are often very abstract, you're just paid to write some code to a specification, you write it, it gets ticked off, you move on to the next project. Working on Open Source is vastly different. I get to talk about features I'm writing with other developers, most of whom I've never met and who live on the other side of the world. Code I write is able to be changed, enhanced, extended by any developer who wants to. I get to go to conferences and talk to developers who have hacked on my code, and teachers who are using features I've written, and I can see the tangible effect these projects are having on their work. I'm constantly amazed at the inventive and innovative ways people are finding to use Open Source Software, and it's humbling to find that I've been even a small part of that.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.